Spotify continues to roll out new options for audiobooks. Last week, it extended the flexibility allowed to users to increase the amount of audiobook listening within Spotify’s paid subscriptions. The new offering starts out in the UK and a few other markets, and the full offering will likely be in the US in the near future. The two new plans allow subscribers to add fifteen hours of audiobook listening to their existing subscriptions.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Audiobooks+ allows this for individual users. Audiobooks+ Plan, meanwhile, allows the additional members on Premium Family and Premium Duo to add fifteen hours of additional audiobook listening. The wording suggests that in the case of the Family option, this applies to each additional person on the plan.
There is also an option for a further ten-hour top-up for really heavy readers. Spotify really is continuing to pursue the audiobook market aggressively, and this feels like a natural expansion, building on not only their additional subscribers, but, as I noted in the past few months, the fact that each of those subscribers is reading more than they were a year ago.
Meta Opts Out of EU AI Code
Meta is the other tech company in the news. Meta’s executives decided that the impending code of practice under the European Union’s AI Act is not for them. It remains to be seen whether the EU concurs with Meta’s conclusion that it is “heading down the wrong path on AI.”
That path, you will recall, is to offer considerably more protection for creators and rights holders through stringent and independent regulation.
Creators and the Question of Pirated Content
The code of practice is voluntary and aimed at assisting the implementation of the AI Act (which means that it does not, itself, form part of the legal requirements of the Act). Meta argues that it goes beyond the scope of the AI Act.
The code of practice covers many things, a lot of which have to do with the EU’s risk categorization that (one would hope) does not directly apply to writers’ concerns. But one part that very much does is a ban on models trained on pirated content.
More on Spotify's expansion of audiobook access for family plan members can be found here.
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